Personal brand Everyone has it - a well-known marketer, a housewife, a child. This is the image of you that forms in the minds of other people: the associations associated with you, your products or services. In a way brand equals reputation: It can evoke negativity, respect, hate, love, or other emotions.

A personal brand is needed to:

• increase the loyalty of the target audience to your products, services, offers;
• increase awareness among a wide or narrow target audience;
• position yourself as an expert in any field and thereby increase the cost of services or goods - an expert product always costs more.

Examples

There are many examples of successful personal branding. For example, world famous personalities:

• Elon Musk- Entrepreneur and inventor. He is the CEO of two large companies Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Both companies work with new technologies, so Elon positions himself as a supporter of new solutions. In fact, he is. Elon drives a Tesla car and plans to carry out a manned mission to Mars in 2020-2025. His secret of success is constant development.
• Vladimir Putin- politician, president Russian Federation. He is known to everyone in our country. Positions itself as a candidate from the general population and actually works with them - takes into account the interests of different social groups, religions, ages.
• Quentin Tarantino- producer. His films are known all over the world without exaggeration. He positions himself as a person who brought special humor to the cinema. The key to Quentin's success is precisely in him: the audience laughs at what is not so funny in reality.
• Queen Elizabeth II. Her personal brand began to build immediately after the coronation, and she still successfully maintains it. Every day, Elizabeth responds to letters from ordinary residents, and throughout her reign, she shows really worthy royal manners and restraint.

Other examples are lesser known. These people are known in narrow circles:

• Artemy Lebedev, designer, owner of a design studio. His popularity is largely due to his active anti-religious position and expressive statements. Many of his entries become catchphrases among designers, editors, and authors.
• Ilya Balakhnin- marketer, CEO of Paper Planes Consulting Agency. He achieved success through hard work: he worked for large companies, including Coca-Cola, Beeline, Russian Standard and others.
• Dmitry Kot- copywriter, author He is widely known in the circles of copywriters, authors, editors. Dmitry conducts webinars, shares useful information with colleagues, writes texts. At the heart of his success is the competent promotion of his name.

Books: what to read about personal branding

1. Tom Peters. “Turn yourself into a brand! 50 surefire ways to stop being mediocre

In his book, Tom Peters talks about why, in his opinion, the era of "I-brands" will soon come and how to effectively promote your personal brand. 50 ways to build a brand have been published, each with step by step guide, answers to questions, examples.

2. David D'Alessandro. Career Wars. 10 Rules for Building a Successful Personal Brand”

This book will be useful to anyone who wants to "stand out from the crowd" and build a successful brand on their own behalf. It really has 10 basic rules of personal branding. In addition, it tells in detail about how to remain yourself, how to work with superiors, how to learn to admit and neutralize your mistakes, and what to do with competitors.

3. Igor Mann. "Number 1"

This book is fully adapted to Russian realities, because it was written by a well-known marketer in Russia who works with local brands. It describes in detail helpful tips, which will help competent personal branding, as well as given practical tasks. You could say that the whole book is a simple route leading you to become number one in your niche.

Conclusion

Personal branding is a laborious, costly, long process. But it gives excellent results: your opinion will be considered, you will be asked for advice, and the value of the goods and services you offer will increase significantly.

— Personal branding expert and brand strategist spoke to business magazine STOLL about how our social media accounts can harm a business and reputation.

Many entrepreneurs have already realized that social networks- a great platform where you can find your target audience and build with it trusting relationship that will eventually turn a potential customer into a buyer.

Why is this happening? Firstly, many people forget that all information posted on social networks becomes public and available to our potential partners and clients.

And secondly, some entrepreneurs believe that they can have two or even three images presented in the information space. On a business page on Facebook - a respectable businessman, on a personal VKontakte - a player in computer games, and on the Instagram page - a lover of drinking with friends in the bath.

Here are the most common mistakes that reduce the credibility of your personal brand on social media.

• Your avatar or profile photo is incorrect

Your potential partner or client wants to see a real photo in order to understand at the first visual contact whether cooperation is possible. If instead of a photograph, a person sees incomprehensible pictures, photographs of animals, some symbols, then the degree of trust in you decreases. How can you be trusted if you are not ready to show your face?

• Name and Surname (pseudonym) are missing or unreadable

Your name should be clear, readable and exactly the one under which you create your brand. It often happens that instead of a name, a profession is indicated. For example, "Seamstress Voronezh" or "Cartoons". For a personal brand, this is detrimental, you will never make your name a brand if you do not identify it.

• There is no indication of what you are doing.

In order for people to come to you, you need to make it clear how you can be useful to them. Your beautiful photo and sonorous name in itself are of no interest to anyone.

• No posts with their own content.

People want to see unique information in the news feed that can be useful to them, and not just family photos or “Who was I in a past life?” test results.

• Small number of friends and followers.

Obviously, your newsfeed posts are not visible to everyone. The distribution of your content depends on the number of those who saw and reacted to your post in the first minutes of publication. And the more followers you have, the more likely you are to be noticed.

• Inconsistency of published materials with the image that you are promoting.

For example, the promotion of a personal brand of a fitness instructor will be leveled by photos of feasts or smoking a hookah.

• Passive behavior in social networks.

If you plan to become a brand, noticeable and recognizable, you need to change the tactics of an observer to the tactics of an active participant in discussions. At the same time, you need to discuss and comment on what your the target audience and so as to demonstrate the level of their immersion in the topic.

• There is no regular posting.

The main principle that helps us keep interest in our person is the regularity of updates. If you publish your posts once a week or once a month, it will be very difficult for you to keep the attention of the public. Most likely in a week they will already forget about you if you have never reminded yourself of yourself during this time.

• The thematic balance of publications is broken

Your subscribers want to see you not only as a professional, but also as a living person who has his own hobbies and personal life. In order to be interesting to the public, do not forget to periodically post posts about what you live. The ideal proportion is 1/3 - professional information, 1/3 - entertaining, 1/3-personal.

• No link to your personal site

Social networks are just a hangout where you can meet interesting people, but you can make them your customers only if you have your own home where you can invite them - your personal website where a person who is interested in you can get comprehensive information about you, your business, your services.

Such errors can sometimes be fatal.

If you are not in control of the impression that your personal brand creates, then you are definitely losing some of your audience at the entrance.

Natalya Podbelskaya,
personal branding expert, brand strategist

It has its own peculiarities, and if you ignore them, then the promotion of a personal brand will either not work out initially, or everything will collapse like a house of cards. I invite you to honestly answer a few questions that you should ask yourself before you start promoting your personal brand on social networks.

1. What is your goal?

What do you want from social networks? Create a loyal community, get sales, upgrade the image of an expert? For each situation there will be a different strategy of action. Give yourself answers to simple questions: "Who is my target audience, and how should they see me?". Write down the image you want to create. Make sure that you have everything to match it and confirm your position (ratings, case studies, photo examples, portfolio, recommendations, knowledge, skills, connections, etc.). The set of "resources" will be completely different in each specific situation.

I like, for example, Andrei Koshcheev's Facebook profile. In the Websarafan.ru podcast, the owner of the Doma Tastier company talks about how promoting his personal brand through social networks helps the development of his company. How, you ask? The logic of the buyer in this case is simple: it is dangerous to order products from an unnamed company on the Internet. Another thing is when the company has a person to whom you can contact directly - with criticism or with gratitude. Andrey Koshcheev became this person.

Always remember the goal and check it for relevance. Write down reference points that will help you understand that you are moving towards your goal. Even if from the very beginning you formulated it, and you are doing well, then over time there is a risk of deviating from it quite strongly and going somewhere free swimming. Away from key messages and from the original target audience, for example.

2. Do you have a content plan or will you be inspired to work?

Inspiration is very fickle. Today it is and I am writing, tomorrow it is not - sorry. And all week I somehow “does not stick”.

A content plan is a working tool that will save you a lot of time thinking about posts.

You need to understand in advance when, where and with what content you will update profiles. Regular updates are not about inspiration. It's about discipline and efficiency. Make a simple spreadsheet like this, work with it regularly, and write down any changes, ideas, and types of posts you might want to make. I guarantee life will be easier:

Always remember the difference between the audience and established traditions in social networks. Your content on a particular site, submission, frequency of publications will depend on this. I talked about the features of promoting a personal brand on Facebook.

Estimate the time and effort: how many times a week do you plan to post? The best option is to update the pages daily. If you do not have such an opportunity, then let it be 2-3 quality posts per week. Your goal is to create content that you want to like, discuss in the comments and take to your page. Better yet, tell your friends and acquaintances about your posts and your profile. Yes, offline. This is aerobatics, which makes sense to strive for.

3. Are you interested in reading at all?

Drive away the temptation to slide into writing boring or monotonous posts. But this does not mean simplification to the level of schoolchildren. Not!

Facebook loves good smart posts, and Instagram is great for long texts to good photo. But reading a post should be easy for the eye, it should be “smooth” - no matter how many economic terms you put into it. With short paragraphs, good formatting, blank lines between paragraphs.

Pictures still get a lot of attention as post illustrations (although Facebook is not clear, and there is a feeling that it underestimates the weight of posts with pictures in the overall results versus posts with just text or video).

At the peak of video popularity. Broadcast, record a video blog, post fragments of performances.

But you don't have to focus only on work. It’s good when no more than 80% of your content is devoted to it, and the rest is life situations, non-banal insights and personal impressions.

I even tried to promote my personal page only from the “I am an expert” category. No, when personal posts were added, engagement and audience growth improved in terms of performance. A couple more times we tested the hypothesis on the accounts of the people we manage. Everything has been confirmed. Variety of posts is always a fat plus. In whatever area you promote your personal brand, no matter how official you would like to be for your audience, but they want to see you as a person as well. It's social networks.

4. Will you go beyond your personal page?

Social media promotion is not limited to your personal page. Beyond its borders there is an immense scope for useful contacts and confirmation of one's expertise. You must know the key communities where your audience is located, the pages of the main opinion leaders for your audience, colleagues, competitors. Write meaningful comments and participate in discussions. Contact them regularly. From page activity in the form of likes and comments to profitable cooperation or investment in your business, there is often one step.

But, please, you don’t need to knock on everyone’s friends with the words: “I am engaged in contextual advertising, let me set everything up for you now, I'm cool. This is a malicious form of spam, which sometimes converts into orders (which is already there), but if we are talking about promoting ourselves, then it only spoils the reputation.

5. Are you ready to respond appropriately to negativity?

When you start getting attention on social media, be prepared to start receiving negativity. Alas, some people are happy to be rude and criticize someone in an extremely rude manner. Moreover, communication on the verge of rudeness is sometimes the “official image” of a person, and he can really be very tough in online communication, maintaining this image. An example of this is Elena Torshina, Alexei Veryutin, Konstantin Kalinov and many other people.

Lena Torshina, for example, sees no reason to adapt to the people around her and radiate friendliness:

Are you ready to communicate in this style? What position will you have if you come across such a style of communication on someone's page in the comments? What if there are comments on your page?

Your reaction to negativity on your part will greatly depend on your own image.

There are no magic pills here. Someone goes to ignore, someone bans, someone is rude in response and puts in place. All positions equally have the right to exist. Moreover, you yourself can communicate in a style similar to the one above, and this will also be normal in terms of personal branding.

I never tire of repeating, but a personal brand is not when everyone loves you. This is when you have a character, and people have certain expectations from communication with you, associations with who you are and what you do. Checkmate here plays the role of nothing more than another “character trait”.

About the author:

Nika Zebra (Veronika Kirillova),

CEO of PR agency Zebra Company

If earlier it was necessary to monitor personal reputation only for famous and public people, now, together with the development of the Internet, this is an important task for every second person. So, who needs to monitor their own reputation and name on the network:

• public people who need a good image - writers, artists, politicians, actors, singers, celebrities, athletes and their loved ones;
• the first persons of the companies. The reputation of a business is 30% dependent on the image of its leader or first person. These are the results of research from the University of California;
• experts, professionals in their field, whose name should not be tarnished;
• applicants for vacancies. Today, HR managers will definitely make inquiries about you, information from the resume and, based on the results of the interview, they are not enough;
• entrepreneurs and startups who use creative activities are looking for additional income. Popularization and pr promotion can help turn a personal, personal brand into a profitable activity;
• for those who just want to express themselves.

This list can be expanded, since in our time even the second half can study you better using the simple tools of the global web.

What gives the promotion of a personal brand on the Internet:

1. Raise awareness and increase awareness.
2. Creating an image. You can position yourself as a specialist or an expert in certain area, to convince everyone of their competence.
3. Your brand is competitive advantage compared to people who are underrepresented online. This is important, for example, for applicants for various positions.
4. Additional communication tool. They will be able to find you and establish communication, if necessary.
5. Positive reputation. By displacing the negative from the TOP of the search, you can appear before the public in the right light.
6. Indirect and direct business benefits. By creating and promoting a personal brand, you can give impetus to business development, improve the company's reputation, and even ensure profit growth.

Online technologies for promoting a personal brand

Making a name for yourself online is easier than offline. For this, in many cases, even monetary investments are not needed, but only time! Creating accounts on social networks, resumes on professional services, maintaining your own blog - all these are opportunities for anyone to make themselves a little more famous for a wide audience.

So, the technology of promotion of a personal brand can be based only on free features. For this you need:

1. Create your blog on free services, for example, Blogger or create a profile on a popular thematic site where you can post publications, leave statuses or comments.
2. Develop and publish a search engine optimized resume. The LinkedIn service and popular job sites where you need to create accounts are ideal for this. Fill in all the important positions, the more information there is, the better for you as a job seeker.
3. Create pages in leading social networks - Twitter, Facebook, Vkontakte. These social media profiles rank well. On the pages you can post photos, share news, communicate. But remember that there is a difference between public and private life. If you want to separate them, then start separate pages - some under a pseudonym - for relatives and friends, and others - under a real name - for a wide audience.
4. Create Accounts in photo and video services. Instagram, Flickr, YouTube - these sites are popular, so their accounts rank well in search engines. But you can’t do without a well-thought-out promotion strategy: in some cases, you can post almost all photos and videos without exception, while in others you can strictly filter information so as not to spoil your personal reputation.
5. Use other tools, for example, a service for creating presentations - SlideShare, create a profile on thematic blogs or forums, create podcasts ...

A serious approach requires working with professionals

These free ways is not always enough for the correct positioning of the individual in the global web. And therefore, the technologies for promoting a personal brand should be based on the experience and knowledge of professionals, the development of a clear strategy and tactics of action.

In this case about free promotion we are no longer talking, but such effective tools are used as:

1. Search promotion of the site.
2. SERM - reputation management, eliminating the negative, building up the positive.
3. PR services, guest posting, work with opinion leaders.
4. SMM with community management in various social networks.
5. Direct marketing, etc.

You can order all these methods of promotion from us - Yeella reputation management and Internet marketing agencies. Contact us if you need services to promote your personal brand on the Internet and guarantee the achievement of your goals!

A freelancer needs to promote a personal brand: it brings in new customers, increases your value in the eyes of current ones, and allows you to increase the prices for your work. But how to promote it? What to do, what to write about? Let's talk about everything today.

We start and design pages in social networks

So, first you need to start pages in those social networks where your target audience is located - people who may need your services. Standard is Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Behance. In VK and Odnoklassniki, promoting a personal brand is a thankless task, most likely you will not find your target audience there. But it’s still worth it: look at profile groups, analyze the popularity of posts on your topic (the number of views and likes in the first place), ask those who promote their pages on these social networks how effective it is for them.

Next, you need to properly design your profile: it is better to take a high-quality (ideally professional) photo for your profile picture, add a thematic cover photo (you can write about your services, place your logo on it) and correctly fill in information about yourself. It should briefly and clearly convey to your potential customers who you are and what you do. For example:

My facebook profile: it is clear what I do and how I came to this point in my career

Next, fill in the jobs. Your experience should be clear. If you have been freelancing for a long time, just indicate: on Facebook, for example, you can create any place of work and indicate it. On LinkedIn, you need to describe in detail everything you do: what you can do, what projects you have done, and what work you do best.

Detailed and understandable description of tasks at the previous place of work

On Instagram, you must indicate the scope of your activity and the contact by which you can be contacted - not everyone uses a personal message for this. The best option is to specify one of the messengers or a link to the site.

Your profile is your calling card, always keep that in mind.

Set a goal

As a rule, there are two goals: to attract new customers or to find buyers for your courses if you have been working in your field for many years and are ready to share experience in exchange for banknotes.

The goal will determine the content of the pages, although you can combine:

• for potential clients your expertise and ability to apply your skills to the benefit of their business are important;
• your expertise is also important for potential students, but they are concerned about how your courses will help them move up the career ladder, earn more, learn something new.

Having defined the goal, write down the tasks that you will solve through posts. It can be:

• sale of courses;
• attract people to the webinar;
• attracting clients with specific requests (high-budget and / or long-term projects, small part-time jobs, and so on).

Approximately 30% of posts should solve these problems directly, the rest - indirectly. The first category includes the so-called selling posts, in which you tell in plain text what services you provide or what you teach.

It may seem that this is too aggressive advertising, but it has been verified: they respond best to posts “on the forehead” with an offer of services. This is how you show that you can take projects to work, and doubting customers (who from your expert posts might think that you are too cool to work with them) will write to you themselves. And to potential buyers of courses, you thus tell in detail about what benefits you can bring to them. If you are embarrassed, remind yourself that this is not impudence, but information: how else will your customers and students learn about what you do, if not from such publications?

Post Ideas

Usually the main problem is the posts themselves: what to write? About what? Isn't that too presumptuous? What if no one reads? What if they think I'm being smart?

Well, and so on. If you fear and doubt good projects you won't get. You need to develop confidence and perseverance. Writing about yourself is not shameful. But to be able to do something and keep silent about it is bad, because someone may need your services, but because of your shyness, this person will have to turn to some amateur. And give him the money that you could earn.

So, here are a few topics that you need to alternately write on personal pages. Of course, you can post some personal posts, thoughts, photos, but make two professional ones for one of your personal posts.

1. Successful completion of the project.

You received the project and handed it over to the customer. There may even be some results (for example, if you are a website designer and have developed a landing page from which n sales came). Write on your page: “Last week I was developing a landing page for dental clinic. It turned out beautifully and, most importantly, effectively - the customer said that the conversion to applications is 20% higher than from the previous landing. And a screenshot with a link to the site.

This is how you show what your work brings. real benefit business, and it is she who ultimately excites any customer.

Getting into the digest of a well-known agency is a great achievement

2. Professional difficulties and their solution

Any specialist in work faces certain problems. Either the code does not work, or the video is not rendered, and so on. Found an elegant and simple solution? Report it on your page. You can also share plugins, actions and other tools that have helped you in your work. Generosity (within reason) is appreciated and paid off.

Cool case, exact numbers and trend of 2018 - video

3. Notes on events and phenomena in your field

Follow conferences and high-profile events and speak out about them. A subjective opinion is a good reason to discuss, which means that your post will appear in the feed of other people who may be potential customers.

The Cossa editor reminds of another important trend of 2018 - hourly videos on Instagram (and reminds the page guests that he is the Cossa editor)

4. Project execution process

Editor and copywriter hosts a podcast and talks honestly about mistakes

5. Expert opinion

You can and should also write about clients - they must see that you perceive them as a partner, not an employer

It is also useful to write expert articles (for example, I wrote about the organization of the workplace and freelance schedule for Cossa) and post a link to them on social networks with a comment in the style of “Shared the experience of the last 5 years, it will be useful for novice designers” if you write about design . Read about in which media you can publish.